Two life-sized dolls in striped bathing suits, one green and white, the other red and white. Two big blue beach towels and a yellow beachball. This is the setting of Les Baigneurs (The Bathers), the performance of Coco Petitpierre (b. Paris, 1966) and Yvan Clédat (b. Paris, 1966, both live in Drancy, France), who, in addition to being artists, are also active as scenographers and costume designers.

Clédat & Petitpierre create work at the intersection of sculpture and performance, often in the public space, searching in their ‘activated works’ for a balance between sculpture and living creatures. Sculpture has always had to do with the body, from the historical relationship to the model depicted, but also based on the timeless relationship of the viewer’s body to the work.

Art history has countless examples of works depicting bathers. This performance was inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Baigneuses au ballon (1928). It is part of a series of small paintings that Picasso made during a family holiday by the sea, depicting an everyday activity: playing on the beach with a ball. But while Picasso’s figures, with their oversized arms and legs, look a little scary, Clédat & Petitpierre’s bathers are more comical and cute, with their plump limbs of folded tulle. During the performance, the figures pretend to be having fun on a beach in the warm sunshine. Lazing, sunbathing, throwing the ball. It is as if the characters have been transposed from European art history to the three-dimensional space of De Oude Warande, where they come to life before the eyes of the visitors, in the form of a cheerful summertime scene. It is familiar and humorous and yet at the same time alienating, as if everyday life were being given a surreal but poetic twist, and it is typical of Clédat & Petitpierre’s practice.

With their contribution to Brief Encounters '22 Clédat & Petitpierre had their debut in the Netherlands.